In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Anthony Wilkinson, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Wilkinson still thinks about those 30 hours — the ones when three patients died. “You try to keep somebody alive, but their body is decomposing,” says Wilkinson.
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Christina Anderson, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. During brutal days at the hospital, Anderson and other nurses would scream or cry together, knowing that at home it would be hard for their families to understand what they were going through. Anderson’s 12-year-old would ask: “Mommy, how many lives did you save today?” Or: “Mommy, how many people died today?”
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Debbie Wooters, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, holds a group picture taken with her fellow nurses in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Many patients were frightened when told they would be put on a ventilator. Wooters remembers a patient who “looked at me and said, through his gasping breath, ‘I don’t want to die.'”
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Lisa Lampkin, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. “I would go home, try to sleep,” she says. Then she would “wake up to the reality of this pandemic again.”
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Elisa Castorena, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Castorena remembers many patients who died, she prefers to focus on happy memories such as working with other nurses to bathe bed-ridden patients while listening to music and joking with them.
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Jamie Corcoran, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. As an ICU nurse the last five years, Corcoran got used to seeing death. She dealt with it by remaining detached. With COVID-19, detachment wasn’t possible.
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Nikki Grecco, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for photos in the closed COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Grecco vividly remembers the first death in the COVID ward and how he died. “I have never felt so defeated as I did in that moment,” Grecco says.
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Cathy Cullen, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Cullen sometimes tears up when thinking about what she and the other nurses endured. “The birth of my children and marriage aside, being a part of this team, this endeavor, and this pandemic is by far the greatest, worst, most rewarding, most painful thing I have ever done in my life,” she says.
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Jill Shwam, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. There is a scene that replays in Shwam’s head each day: an 11-year-old boy screaming while his mother, in her early 40s, doesn’t respond as doctors try to save her. “You need to say goodbye,” Shwam remembers saying as the woman’s oxygen levels dropped sharply. The woman told her son: “I hope this isn’t the last time I talk to you. I have to go.”
In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Verlin Frazier, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in front of a patient board in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Frazier still remembers watching a woman walk between RotoProne beds to reach — and say goodbye to — her husband. “I remember biting my tongue and cheek, holding my breath, anything to prevent myself from bursting into tears,” says Verlin.
In early 2020, when the coronavirus began making it difficult for many people around the world to breathe, hospitals became a central front against a disease that, more than a year later, has killed nearly 4 million human beings and counting.
At one hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., a team of nurses and doctors were recruited for what became the Isolation Intensive Care Unit. Many volunteers at Providence Mission Hospital had come from cardiac and surgical intensive care units, where they deal with death and trauma each day.
Launched in March 2020, the isolation unit would come to be known as “Tip of the Spear,” a military term used to describe a group doing dangerous work. Many nurses who would spend countless hours with patients, helping them return to health or helping them say goodbye to family, got tattooed with spears, hash marks and a heart.
Today, those nurses speak of forming deep bonds and of the joy in helping some deathly sick patients survive. But they also can’t forget horrific and heart-breaking experiences that are very much still with them, even months after the hospital’s special unit shut down as cases in California dropped sharply.
With little knowledge of how to treat patients, and amid enormous personal risks, these nurses had leaped into the abyss. They will never be the same.
To capture the reality that the horrors of COVID-19 will be with us for years to come, even as many countries move beyond the pandemic, Associated Press photojournalist Jae C. Hong turned to an unusual form of photography not typically used in the context of reporting the news. He employed a special exposure technique in photographing 10 nurses in areas of the isolation unit, now empty.
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